Reviewed by Carissa

TITLE:  Dance With Me

AUTHOR:  Heidi Cullinan

PUBLISHER:  Self-Published

LENGTH:  282 pages

BLURB:  

Sometimes life requires a partner.

Ed Maurer has bounced back, more or less, from the neck injury that permanently benched his semipro football career. He hates his soul-killing office job, but he loves volunteering at a local community center. The only fly in his ointment is the dance instructor, Laurie Parker, who can’t seem to stay out of his way.

Laurie was once one of the most celebrated ballet dancers in the world, but now he volunteers at Halcyon Center to avoid his society mother’s machinations. It would be a perfect escape, except for the oaf of a football player cutting him glares from across the room.

When Laurie has a ballroom dancing emergency and Ed stands in as his partner, their perceptions of each other turn upside down. Dancing leads to friendship, being friends leads to becoming lovers, but most important of all, their partnership shows them how to heal the pain of their pasts. Because with every turn across the floor, Ed and Laurie realize the only escape from their personal demons is to keep dancing—together.

This novel has been previously published and has been revised from its original release.

REVIEW:  

Dance With Me has always been a favorite of mind from the wonderful catalog of stories by Heidi Cullinan. Ed and Laurie, with their almost visible sparks clashing between them, are grounded in a life that feels completely real. Their story isn’t a march towards some grand climax, but instead layers of real life hardship over real life achievements and growth. This journey of discovering where their lives will take them is as sweet as it is painful–literally, in some cases, for Ed.

At the beginning of this story both men are at what they think of as the highest moment of their lives. The culmination of years of work. But both are quickly sent tumbling off that height. Ed suffers a career-ending injury to his neck. Laurie loses his boyfriend, his reputation, and probably worst of all…his confidence on the stage. While they both suffer set-backs of different kinds, it is a common loss. The futures they had both planned now lay in ruins.

It is not their loss that brings them together–at least not overtly–but their love of dance. Laurie–with his years of dance experience–and Ed–with nothing but a few dance classes under his belt–might seem like an odd partnership, but thru their lessons and their dances they find something they had both thought lost forever: hope. Now it might not be the shining example of hope they had before their losses, but having been tested and tried, it is perhaps a more solid one.

This theme of lost and found plays heavily throughout the story. And the things they have lost may have not been what they thought they were, nor the things they found what they were looking for, but in each other there is a future they never thought to have. The way that hardship and hope play off each other in this story really brings it to life. Sometimes things are good, sometimes they are bad…and sometimes they’re both.

This isn’t an “everything is fixed in 90 minutes” story. Ed’s neck does not suddenly heal itself by the power of love. Laurie does not go on to rejoin the dancing elite, more confident and talented than before. Their lives and expectations change–and they learn to see new dreams in the ashes of their old ones.

The hard struggle, the heartbreaking losses, is what makes this story something that stands the test of years. It is not fancy, it does not strike out new paths, but this book resounds with you. At times you nearly vibrate with it. There are some books you are always gong to come back to, be it a third or a thirtieth time, and I truly believe that this is one of them. Because it is not so much the ending you crave, but the journey. And that journey is worth taking time and again.

RATING:

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